Artie Mendoza had a blood condition: he couldn’t stand the sight of it. It wasn’t the kind of full-blown hemophobia that would cause him to pass out at first glance, but it definitely made him queasy. His doctor diagnosed it as a B-I-I-type phobia (blood-injection-injury), and that tracked with Artie because any visuals depicting physical injury, real or fake (from bodily harm videos online to the artificial bloodshed manufactured in films), would turn his delicate stomach.
His wife Sophie called him a blood wimp, and would roll her French eyes whenever he suggested that his squeamish nature had been manifested in his youth by a red antiseptic that seemed to occupy a corner in every Latin family’s medicine cabinet. They called it monkey blood (or sangre de chango in Spanish), but it was just merbromin (often marketed as Mercurochrome), and as you might have guessed by the name, it contained mercury. Everyday consumers are not generally looking for side effects in their standard antiseptic (let alone mercury poisoning), so it was eventually banned in most countries; but long before that, mild injuries like knee scrapes, burns, and dog bites sustained during many-a-child’s youth were treated with sangre de chango. And because it doubled as a medical dye, the resulting crimson stain would turn even the smallest abrasions into the seemingly blood-soaked wounds that Artie claimed had damaged his sensitive psyche.
As an adult, Artie found it easier to avoid injury, and he sidestepped footage that captured moments when others had failed to follow in his footsteps. This included deprogramming TV channels that documented medical and surgical procedures that might’ve resulted from such accidents, and he limited his streaming to movies that were either G or PG rated. This lack of exposure was all well and good, but any armchair psychologist will tell you that the more we avoid our fears, the more we strengthen them, and the weaker we become at coping with them when they reemerge unexpectedly, the way they did for Artie last month on that breezy Saturday afternoon.
The Mendozas had been living in their Spanish-style mission bungalow for a year when their gardener Erizo was deported back to Venezuela. While in the market for a replacement, the biweekly duties required to maintain the neighborhood status of a “well-manicured lawn” fell into the incapable hands of its patriarch. It wasn’t that Artie was lousy at mowing and blowing (“It doesn’t require any skill,” he would foreshadow the day before), it was the lack of reliable lawn equipment that complicated the mission. His weed wacker, lawnmower, leaf blower, and hedge trimmer were not only cheap and flimsy, but they were powered by electricity, and that made the uncoordinated campaign all the more awkward because even though the e-tools were inferior to motorized hardware, they were still capable of slicing through the entangling extension cords required to power them, something Artie managed to validate not once that day, but twice.
He was on his third and final extension cord when he started trimming the wax leaf privet hedges surrounding the front lawn. The neighbor’s gardener, a Honduran named Foco, yelled to Artie in Spanish from the adjacent lawn, “You’re supposed to trim first so you can mow the clippings!” Artie gave him a flippant nod and Foco followed up, “How much are they paying you over there?”
Sophie pulled into the driveway before Artie could answer. She gave him a kiss on the lips and Foco’s jaw dropped to the neighbor’s Bermuda grass in disbelief. After Sophie went inside, Foco asked his presumed fellow paisa (with a series of hand gestures and high pitched whistles) if he was smashing the boss’s white wife and Artie shook his head no but Foco gave him Latin lover props anyway and promised not to tell anyone. Artie felt insulted. “I’m not a frickin’ gardener,” he assured himself, “I’m a quality engineer!” But then Foco went to work trimming a queen palm with a pruning pole and Artie looked on with stupefied admiration. That brawny Honduran was breaking his back to remove a dozen dead fronds; sawing and clipping, catching and clearing them as they fell to the ground to avoid damaging the surrounding landscaping vegetation. Artie peered down at his gloved hands with a quiet, inspired humility, then picked up his hedge trimmer with restored machismo and declared under his breath, “Today, cabrón, you’re a gardener!”
Artie pulled up a thick branch to create the tension needed to give his shitty trimmer a clean cut and when he applied the shearing blades, he heard his thumb bone crunch. He didn’t even look down to assess the damage when it happened. He just figured it was gone–cut in two like one of the extension cords from before. Artie dropped the trimmer, clutched his mutilated hand, and ran inside with both arms over his head to prevent his delusional fear of bleeding to death.
“Call 911!” he screamed when he got indoors.
“What happened?” asked Sophie with moderate concern, having learned from previous histrionics not to overreact.
“I chopped off my thumb! Call 911 and then get a bucket of ice so we can preserve the severed digit, which you’ll find somewhere near the hedges!”
Sophie looked at the gloved hands over his head. “The gloves appear to be intact.”
“Trust me. It was a clean cut.”
“Remove them and let’s have a look.”
“If I take ‘em off I’ll spray blood everywhere.”
Sophie yanked his arms down and Artie looked away, shutting his eyes. When the gloves came off, the wound could not be located right away because it resembled a paper cut, a tiny sliver near the knuckle that blended in with the other wrinkles. It wasn’t even substantial enough to upset Artie when he finally looked down with one eye open. “Is that it?”
They moved to the bathroom. “It must have been the branch I heard crunching,” he explained as Sophie rubbed ointment on his thumb with a smirk on her face. After applying a bandage, she kissed it like a mother kissing a booboo. “Be careful out there, you blood wimp.”
Artie returned to the scene of the accident and Foco asked if he was okay because he heard loud screaming. Artie shook it off and gave him a thumbs up that revealed his Paw Patrol Band-Aid. Foco smiled and nodded with relief, then waved back, but with only four fingers because his thumb had been chopped off in a previous gardening accident. Artie fainted and fell to the ground like a bag o’ wet mulch.
When he woke up in Foco’s arms, Artie offered him a gardening job under the condition that he wear gloves at all times, and Foco declined.